hi everyone!

well, i know matt’s been keeping everything pretty up-to-date with what we’ve been doing. thank goodness, because i’m just too busy to breathe. on my mind at this moment is our upcoming few days in prague. i can never really get enough of that city. i’m going to try to get re-inspired to take some photos, since i’ll have so much free time on my hands, but to be honest, i’m just looking forward to not having much in the way of responsibilities for a few days.

last week i was busy with preparations for our halloween party, which was a smaller than expected success, but fun for those of us who were there. now that it’s over, though, i have to find time to do the various clean-up jobs. with these high ceilings, it’s hard to get the decorations up and down. my schedule is getting pretty full. i interviewed another new student today, and she will start wednesday after next. i also got an email from the coworker of the father of another student, who wants lessons for his teenage son. he sounds pretty serious, and if i take him on as well, that means i will have at least one student every day of the week. it doesn’t sound like much, but i also have my own lessons and classes that i take: metalsmithing, pottery, dutch, violin and kickboxing. also running with annemette. right now i am doing a bit of schedule juggling to keep thursday afternoons after 1pm free of commitments. i would kill for a spa day at this point. ugh. (actually, the new teenager has requested thursday afternoon as one of his days, but i said that i was unavailable.)

i haven’t had time for any of my personal hobbies that don’t have a class attached to them, which makes me a little grumpy. i was in the middle of a few projects at the beginning of september, and time is rushing by quickly without a chance to finish them. i try to make time, but when i do, i’m just tired. tuesday i was very tempted to skip metalsmithing and relax. i almost did it, too. oh well. and i’ve left pottery after no time at all once, but it hardly counts since i go there often late in the evenings to finish up things that i haven’t had time to finish during my class, but that need to be done before they dry too much.

this kind of schedule gives me the munchies, and i’ve been indulging a bit too much. so i’m drinking water right now, but sitting here at matt’s computer on the kitchen worktable, the munchies are close and a little too inviting. i think i should log off and go back to my violin, which i was playing before i decided to sit here.

i love getting dressed up. i love an excuse for it. any excuse, and any type of dressing up. so, when matt and i heard that some of dick’s friends were having a masquerade for their birthday party this weekend, we begged to be invited along.

it was a good party, and a chance to meet some of dick’s friends again, in a new setting (for me). i really liked many of them. and there was a room set aside for dancing, which was really perfect. i danced a lot. so did matt. so did dick, actually. happiness.

a reprise of the entire evening is impossible. i won’t even attempt it. i wish we’d been able to go somewhere else to sleep, though. as many of you minnesotans know, i don’t like to spend the night at other people’s houses with lots of people. i get tired of people, and really start hating them. well, that happened. it’s uncontrollable. so i tried to take space by hanging out on the terrace, but that made many of them think i was sick, and then continuously ask me if i was ok. which is worse. oh well. we managed to escape pretty early the next day. if i’m lucky, most of them will remember me more from earlier in the evening, when i wasn’t sick of people. i had some really fun conversations with lots of people.

the next day, we went shopping at a couple of favorite places in amsterdam. that was also fun, and i found a really gorgeous dress and boots that i really wanted, but unfortunately were very expensive, so i had to skip them. oh well.

i have just returned a few minutes ago from an excursion to an art gallery with some women in the international women’s club. although there were few things that i really liked in the gallery, my brain is filled with ideas. so, what am i doing typing here? good question. i have other things to do. and part of me just wants to lie around with a book and continue recovering from the weekend. ha. and you see where my moment of motivation just disappears….

so, i had to go running way too early this morning, because annemette had a 10:00 dutch lesson with desiree. she picked me up at 8. ick. but so we ran, and when i got back, i spent 2 hours on my terrace, cleaning it up. even though some of the dahlias and sunflowers still had buds, i cut them down. with all the demolition dust, they looked pretty crappy anyway. so i cut lots of other things down, too. trimmed some of the herbs. then i dug up all the tuberous things for the winter, since last year i had a lot of rottage. too wet here. then i harvested tomatoes and tomatillos, and cleaned up their areas, and emptied the varieties of poor sad basils and cilantro into the compost. it’s been very cold and wet for too long, and everything looks pretty awful. anyway, i need to get over to intratuin sometime this week and see if i can pick up some kind of mulch to put over things, and i need to plant the various bulbs i’ve bought in the last few days, and then the garden will pretty much be done for the year. that’s good. i’ve been pretty lazy about it for a few weeks, and it really needed that. i’d like to buy some evergreen trees to put around it. maybe i’ll do that, too. and i need to bring the fig inside (requiring figuring out WHERE to put it).

then i had lunch, and made some snickerdoodles because it is fucking cold in the house and that gave me an excuse to turn on the oven. oh, and had a shower. and did some laundry. and read for a while.

and then i thought: oh, i need to figure out what needs doing on my halloween costume! so i pulled it out of the attic, found that cat has pissed on part of it (i can’t figure out when!), and discovered my long lost edible honey shimmer dust tucked into the costuming box. yay! i’ve been missing that. i can’t find the little sequined slippers that go with the bellydancing costume that is part of my overall costume (which is NOT a bellydancing costume), so i might need to make some, so my feet aren’t cold at the party.

speaking of parties: anyone reading this is invited to our halloween party, on the 29th, here in maastricht. yay!

then i messed around online a little. i need halloween decor. finding good stuff here in europe is damn hard. i miss target and michael’s, and joann fabrics. i can’t believe it. and i’m thinking about last-minute weekend trips for matt and me. i was thinking turkey, but well, what i found was for a whole week. perhaps barcelona or something instead. dunno. a friend is having a party on friday night, but we wanted to leave for the whole weekend, starting as soon as matt can get off work on friday. we’ll see. last resort: we go down to paris for a couple of days. no harm there! i love paris.

well, that’s that. student coming at 5:20 tonight, and i need to go get the stuff together for him. ciao! and i have too many things on my mind, and curiosities that are being contemplated to continue just documenting my day like this. silliness.

dear friends: sorry so low on posts lately. i have tried to read up on yours, but have been feeling not very commentative lately. anyway, i’ll try to be better.

last week, without going into much in the way of details, was very very busy and also very interesting. interesting can also mean stressful, and now my body is telling me about it. ick. i feel pretty shitty, but here i go into another week. i spent as much of today sleeping as possible. which really wasn’t all that much, if i count up the hours, but still. and now it’s 11:15, and although i’m very tired, i’m having trouble sleeping. tomorrow is tuesday, and that means violin, metalsmithing and pottery all over again. a big day. hopefully all the sleeping today helped.

really, this week looks pretty slow, which is really needed right now. on the other hand, i met with two potential students last week and should be hearing back from them in the next couple of days (i hope), so my schedule could fill faster than i think. saturday matt is going to a bachelor party in amsterdam, and i’m supposed to leave my schedule open for a girl thing, although we don’t know yet what’s being planned. the sister of the bride is in charge, and apparently running late. well, we’ll see. annemette and marivi and i think that if nothing gets planned, at least the 3 of us can take suzanne out that evening, and maybe something will get planned for another night.

i have recurring thoughts about elements from the OTHER movie named “crash,” with james spader. i haven’t seen it in years, and sold my copy in our last garage sale in the states. maybe i should rent it sometime soon.

well, i don’t have much time right now, but i wanted to update quickly. i’ll try to get on and read about friends later this afternoon or tomorrow.

yesterday was my big art day at kumulus. i went to metalsmithing for the first time, and pottery. metal was difficult. try learning something complicated and entirely new in another language. yikes. i mean, i’ve had a basic understanding of many of the other things i’ve tried to do in dutch, but wow. and the teacher speaks really really fast. he has a lot to tell us about. i was pretty confused, but in the end, had made good progress on our first project, a 4cm x 4cm pin or pendant using 2 sheets of metal, one cut up and puzzled back together, then soldered onto the other. so far, i’ve made a design (which took about an hour, i might add, and got a very confusing lecture on the process of design, which i didn’t follow at all), then sawed it out, and am in the middle of filing down the pieces. i was glad i got so far, actually. after an hour of design, i was sure i was never going to manage to make anything. and dude, either i DON’T GET dutch humor, or jokes directed incessantly at me are not always funny. ugh. i felt pretty rotten leaving class, and wiped out.

later that night, i went to pottery. good news: a friend of mine is also in there… ursula. i didn’t know she had planned to do it too, but there she was. yay! and the wheels are manual, so i’m having to learn a bit differently. my leg got really tired for the first hour, from kicking the wheel around, and centering is more difficult on a manual wheel (i think), but eventually i got the hang of it. i made 4 matching espresso cups in the last hour. the two hours before that, i mostly just practiced things. i was pretty proud of the cups, though: they match! i’ve never really tried much to make matching things before, but yay! then some woman knocked them over while not paying attention to what she was doing as she wrapped her own work. bitch. but i managed to salvage them. whoo. so i was pretty happy. and now i have yellow clay under my nails. 🙂 happiness.

matt bought a motorcycle. i think i’m about to go ride it. i need a shower, though, since i just got back from running over st. pieter with annemette and marivi. toodles.

matt and i were talking yesterday, and we agree that we are really impressed with the people in our lives, even the ones we don’t see very often (which is ever so many of them/you). so many people that we know are interesting people, for all different kinds of reasons. yay. thanks.

so, last night i was feeling really hyperactive, and matt and i invited dick over (well, originally the plan was to go out somewhere) and we played some card games. actually, i was so hyperactive that i could barely sit still, so really i was mostly dancing around the living room and losing every game. the energy level lasted a very long time, so when matt, who wasn’t feeling well, went up to bed, dick and i went exploring the construction site behind the apartment. we had planned to go down into the wine cellars, and we did manage to locate the entrance to them, when i walked across a sheet of plywood that was hollow-sounding, but when we went to go find a ladder, i became side-tracked by the ramps up to the mostly demolished parking garage. half of it is broken off, and you have to take a little climb each time to get to the next ramp area. we climbed to the top, and found another ladder, so that we could sit up on the very top of the tall parking garage. from there, we could see a lot of maastricht. the maas river looked very beautiful, and the wilhelmina bridge was an empty expanse. because all the surrounding buildings have been taken down, we had a lovely view of so many of the gorgeous churches and other buildings in the city. i thought the stadhuis was particularly cool. it was windy up there, and tempting to lean into the wind while standing on the ledge of the wall we had been sitting on, but leaning was a bad idea. i didn’t do it. i just stood there. i could even see into my apartment pretty clearly, since we were right above it. amazingly, we could hear a lot of noises of the late night city from there. i loved it. i was filthy when i got home. 🙂

maybe next time matt can come, and we can see the wine cellars. before they too get demolished.

today i had my first lesson with one of my new students, a 16 year old from madrid named fernando. good kid. funny, and really advanced, except in listening and speaking. there is much repetition for both of us, to communicate, but if there’s writing as well, then no problem. i will have 2 lessons with him per week. i think he will advance quickly. yay.

tonight we are having dinner with mark, boyfriend of a friend and owner of two kitties that i cat-sit regularly. we have never met in person before. i’m looking forward to it.

well, i’m back from hamburg. my meeting with jesse, the espresso cart guy in hamburg, was really great. he’s got a really simple operation, simpler than i was planning, but it’s really doing well. hard work, certainly, but sounds great. i have to send off some emails and letters of requests for information from some other places, also some thank you’s to people for talking with me and/or providing me with free samples. but i’m very excited. i think this can happen! yay!

in other news, i have a meeting with the parents of a new student this afternoon. they are interested in 2 2-hour lessons per week, which is great for my budget. yay! it’s a 16-year old spanish boy. i also got a call from another spanish woman who also is interested. i’m phone-tagging with her right now. yay again!

did i mention i signed up for some art classes at kumulus? they start next tuesday and i got the confirmation letters today. metal-smithing from 1-4, and pottery from 7-10. lovely. i like that they’re both on tuesdays, also. my violin lesson tends to be tuesday mornings, which means that all my creative type lessons are on tuesday. i like it that way, all focused. i’m more likely not to skip anything when the whole day is devoted to one type of activity. dutch lessons will stay for now on wednesday nights, although matt may need to change this. oh well.

and that’s all the gnus. for now.

hello, darlings…

well, here i am at the end of day 2 of my trip to hamburg. i had a strange start to the day. i got really lucky last night and didn’t have to share my dorm room, and woke up feeling a little panicky about time. i thought my clock said it was 10 am, so i hurried and rushed off to see the tea and coffee world cup exhibit at the convention center, but when i got to the metro, found it was only 9. heh.

anyway, i went to the trade fair, which is why i’m here in hamburg, and at first was both overwhelmed and disappointed. rather than being helpful, people i talked to seemed pretentious and condescending, and there was no cart supplier listed. i went to the organizer stand, to ask, and the man there didn’t know what i was talking about, then made a big show of checking for a category “carts”, and of course there wasn’t one, which i already knew, since i can read the index myself.

so, frustrated, i sat down and went through the list in the book, and started circling ones i thought i should go see. this proved much more useful. unfortunately, most of the coffee people there were suppliers of green coffee, not roasted coffee. some of them were kind enough to give me information on roasters they supplied, but many just looked at me like i was crazy. so, after a bit of this, i went back to my list, and finished circling things. then i started talking to espresso machine manufacturers. mostly, that was also fruitless, but then i stopped, in a funny mood, at one, and when the man asked me if i had questions, i rather vaguely said, “sure… all of the above. whatever.. the basics…” and instead of sending me on my way with a flyer and a general, “here is a distributor in your area that can give you more info,” he sat me down, gave me something to drink (first a bottle of water, but eventually a glass of prosecco), and went through all kinds of info for me. eventually he asked me exactly what my plans are, and i told him, and also that i was frustrated by the lack of cart manufacturers at the conference, and he said that his company had recently made their first, here in hamburg, for a caribbean guy here. so he showed me a bunch of pictures of it, and told me some general specs, then called the guy up and asked him where he’ll be tomorrow. so now this cart guy is expecting my visit tomorrow, and i get to talk to him about how his business is going.

did i mention that the whole espresso cart thing is just about unheard of here in europe? i’m pretty much explaining the idea over and over to people. so it’ll be great to meet someone else doing it.

after this nice espresso machine guy, i hit the syrups and condiments vendors. that was fun, as many of them gave me LOADS of samples. my backpack got VERY heavy. many of them are full-size samples, too, not little packages. i also got lots of free ground coffee from enthusiastic african men. 🙂 the white guys were NEVER willing to give up the bags of coffee, but for some reason, the africans were. first it was a guy from ethiopia, then another guy from nairobi. the nairobi guy was working with a german guy, and the german got really crabby when he found out i was being given full bag samples and i’m not even in their distribution area. dude, i had been up front about that from the beginning, but whatever.

anyway, i left at 3pm or so, and headed for the spice museum, which also gave a free sample of a bag of pepper. it was mz free sample day. after that i couldn’t hardly carry my bag anymore, so i went back to the hostel. i was running so early that i even had time to go to the museum of arts and crafts for an hour before they closed. then i went back to the cool student area i was in last night, and had sushi for dinner, then went to a cool cocktail bar for a caipirinha, then back to the hostel.

when i got here, the guys i’d talked to last night were here with a bunch of others, and all hanging out in the common area. well, they’re all still there, actually. behind me. pretty funny… i keep having to control my need to interrupt their conversation.

so, i’m wiped. going down to my room here in a few minutes, and probably sort through my fliers. tomorrow i will go see the cart guy, then to the photography museum, then head home to maastricht.

and that’s the basics. i’ve been writing a lot, too. weirdness, as i’m not really any kind of writer. heh. but i’m enjoying it, and feeling really full of things to say, none of which, strangely, have i included here. (what a teaser!!!)

bye!

hi! i have 3 minutes left on internet. am in hamburg, enjoyable evening. now drinking paulaner in hostel. (ha ha dick!!) have used all my phone minutes smsing and also calling, and can’t recharge. dammit.

tomorrow coffee trade fair. exciting.

the erotic art museum here is the best i’ve seen!

sharon.

well, i had a really fun birthday yesterday. when i woke up, i went to kickboxing for the first time here. wow. it was really hard, but i did great, and it felt really good. i’m planning to go every saturday morning, unless i’m out of town. the class was 1 1/2 hours, and about 30 minutes at the beginning were really hard conditioning warmups and some stretching. briefly, i thought i was going to die. then some free sparring, then combination training with a partner, then “cool down.” the cool down wasn’t really cooling. it was about 15 minutes of ab work. holy fucking shit. i can’t even describe. today, i’m pretty stiff, all over, but it feels really good.

so then i went and fed mark’s cats, then met matt and dick for some lunch at cafe zondag. they’d been out testdriving motorcycles. then matt and i went home to prepare for the party.

the party was excellent. i did cocktail-fu, and got everyone completely toasted, except myself. well, and a couple others. 2 people didn’t drink at all, and for some bizarre reason matt didn’t drink much either. neither did dick. but everyone else was toasted and had a great time. and everyone brought presents! that was a bit of a surprise… i really hadn’t needed presents, but i’m definitely not complaining. they were all great. speaking of which, i’m going downstairs soon to try one of ghislaine’s cookies. yum.

since everyone was trashed, the party didn’t make it very late. about 3 a.m. unfortunately, i got a second (or some other number) wind around then and was absolutely energetic.

woke up this morning around 10. matt wanted to go motorcycle shopping again with dick, so we invited him over again for breakfast (after all, we had breakfast supplies to feed whatever might have been left of the party), then they took off. i went to the kumulus center for the arts to visit their open house. i talked to the metalsmithing teacher, and have signed up for one of the metalsmithing classes and also pottery with the same teacher i took ceramic handbuilding from last year. then i went to feed mark’s kitties again.

and then i bit the bullet and stopped in at matuchi to see if they’d hire me as a bartender. the guy working was not very enthusiastic, or even polite. he didn’t understand my dutch, although the girl there did just fine, and he told me that my lack of dutch would be a problem. bullshit. matt bartended in prague with no czech. people say the drink, and you get it for them. i can do small talk. what i don’t know how to do is ask for a job, friendly and casually. oh well. i left my name and phone number and he said he’ll give it to the boss. right. somehow i doubt it.

there’s a live band playing at cafe zondag this afternoon, and sofia and dev told us they’re going. so we’re going to head over there too.

thanks for the birthday wishes from many of you after my last post! and don’t worry, nathan, although i didn’t drink much, i did drink some, and so i lifted one for you, too! 🙂